The First Annual Harvard-Portugal Programme Symposium took place on the 14th and 15th of December at the Belém Cultural Centre (CCB) in Lisbon. Over 200 researchers, doctors and students from all over the country were involved in this free event. It was an encounter marked out by the high scientific quality of the talks and the massive attendance by medicine students, in a clear indication of the importance of this event as a meeting point for the promising young hopes for medicine and research in Portugal.

This initiative is a part of the Harvard Portugal Program, which aims at encouraging the internationalisation of Portuguese medical research, as well as promoting cooperation among Portuguese medical schools and biomedical research centres. The programme has three main lines of activity: a clinical and translational research programme, advanced medical training, and the production of health information in the Portuguese language, dedicated to the public in general and health students and professionals.

The scientific programme of the symposium includes such issues as the new RNA-based therapies and the recent advances in research into cancer and ageing, among others. All of the guest speakers – internationally-renowned researchers – gave excellent talks and provided moments for discussion which greatly interested the listeners.

Robert A. DePinho was the first speaker at the symposium. So that there remained no doubts about the importance of telomeres – the terminal part of chromosomes – he reminded the audience that the 2009 Nobel Prize was awarded to researchers who discovered the way that telomeres protect chromosomes, he spoke about the relationship between the dynamics of these structures and cancer and ageing. Robert A. DePinho is an American doctor and director of the Belfer Institute for Applied Cancer Science (which is a part of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute), as well as being a teacher of medicine and genetics at the Harvard Medical School, where he has researched into the functioning of telomeres for over a decade.

In her talk, the researcher Benedita Rocha, from the Paris René Descartes Faculty of Medicine, defended that the greatest question facing immunologists is the capacity for the immune system cells to divide, in two aspects: the capacity of a non-differentiated lymphocyte to give rise to a thousand billion billion cells and the enormous capacity for replication that these cells maintain after having been differentiated – something which is not observed in other tissues. For this reason her medical team is determined to understand what is going on in the cell cycle of the immune system, particularly what takes place with type D cyclins, a family of molecules involved in the cell cycle. According to Rocha, the studies carried out by her team have altered the view on the role of cyclins during the cell cycle, forcing one to also review what one believes takes place in other cell tissues.

As she mentioned in her talk, Adriano Aguzzi has been obsessed by prions for twenty years, before and after these strange proteins becoming the order of the day due to mad cow disease. Prions are proteins with an abnormal structure capable of converting other healthy proteins into proteins with abnormal structures. If one of these molecules reaches the brain it may pervert the molecules and cause dementia, as is the case of Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease, or spongiform encephalitis. Adriano Aguzzi is from the Copenhagen University Hospital Institute of Neuropathology, and his talk focused on intriguing aspects of prion biology, such as how these infectious agents reach the brain and why the immune system has not evolved in order to combat them.

Nuno Sousa is interested in the negative effects of chronic stress, which sets off important alterations in the brain. Sousa heads a team from the University of Minho, and began his talk by explaining that although chronic stress does not cause cell death in the hypofield, it at least reduces their volume. During his talk, Nuno Sousa spoke about how researchers have detected links between this reduction in volume and signs of depression and mechanism disease, through which chronic stress induces loss of brain volume in mice and the effects that stress has on memory and behaviour.

The new therapies against HIV/AIDS may become based on cell biological processes that were not know twenty years ago. Judy Lieberman works at the Harvard Medical School, in Boston, and intends to use the influence of RNA as a therapeutic weapon. The interference of RNA is a process that was discovered a little over a decade ago and is able to prevent gene expression. Judy Lieberman described the studies carried out by her team in order to produce a drug capable of preventing HIV transmission through vaginal contact.

The talk given by Aaron M. Cypess was totally devoted to a type of fat that is not discussed much, brown fat. Brown fat is almost exclusively associated with babies and animals that live in cold areas. This type of tissue, which is particularly accumulates in the region of the kidneys and the neck, serves to release heat in order to maintain body temperature, instead of promoting the storing of lipids, as “normal” fat does. What Aaron Cypess’s team shows in its studies is that brown fat is also present in adults, suggesting that it may be a complementary source of fighting obesity.

Malaria is caused by a parasite that lodges in a mosquito and the human being, killing over a million children per year. The Portuguese researcher Maria Mota, head of a team based at the Institute of Molecular Medicine, in Lisbon, defends that there are many biological questions related to the disease to which it is necessary find a response. One of the most important ones is the degree of interconnection between the human phases of the disease. She is particularly interested in studying the link between the hepatic phase, which comes before the appearing of symptoms, and the sanguinary phase, during which the disease is revealed, and the results her team has achieved until now suggest that it is counterproductive to study the phases of the disease independently.

Dyann Wirth also spoke about the fight against malaria, stressing the problem of resistance developed by the malaria parasite against the drugs used to eradicate the disease. Dyann Wirth, is the director of the Harvard Malaria Initiative and is a senior specialist in this and other tropical diseases. Her work focuses on the genetics of the parasite, aiming at identifying the medication against which the malaria parasite will have the greatest probability of developing resistance and making new cocktails capable of better results.

Professor Maria do Carmo Fonseca
Institute of Molecular Medicine
imm@fm.ul.pt